nesdev.org

I have quite a few devices that only have a parallel port. First and foremost my Super Wildcard DX2. Needless to say my macbook does not come with a parallel port ;-] There might be some usb<->parallel-port-printer adapters but those most certainly will be completely useless for the bit banging required by the copier protocol.

Are there any other ways anyone could think of ? Maybe some small microcontroller devboard with a USB port to connect to the PC and a parallel port to connect to SWC/whatever ? Is that feasible ? I can't be the only one who would like to resurrect some parallel-port only devices ?

In a desktop if you can get a non-USB parallel port (on-board, PCI, PCIe) that will often work. Laptops, on the other hand...

A microcontroller project is ambitious, because it will probably involve completely reimplementing the host-side software, or reverse engineering the original host software and splicing out the entire original communications protocol. Of course, if the host software is open source, that makes this task a lot easier.

Yeah well a parallel-port pci card is as easy as it is futile considering i haven't owned a desktop pc in years.

since this is a problem for you with multiple devices,
why can't you just find a used box PC?

I bet they're really cheap. Even coming with an XP License and such.

The SWC DX2 supports hard disks, ZIP drives, and CDROMs through some particular manner (IDE, so I'm guessing IDE to LPT?) which I can't remember. I have a working SWC DX2 as well, BTW, but I don't use Macs.

You're correct about the USB-LPT adapters existing but causing complexities when it comes to the nature of some transfer software. I wrote a SWC DX transfer program many years ago in Pascal + assembly for DOS on x86; it wasn't that complicated. Most of the time is spent polling the LPT status port in a loop saying "are you ready?"

The LPT communication protocol for the SWC series is documented here ("PARALLEL I/O PROTOCOL"): http://cgfm2.emuviews.com/txt/swcteche.txt

To be honest the most complicated part was getting support for 24 and 32mbit working. I wasn't able to accomplish this until one day a colleague of mine (Royce from Damaged Cybernetics) told me to bitwise AND the raw data bytes with some special value -- and it worked. I still to this day have no clue how/why. And the uCON64 source is kind of an uncommented dump of a mess... :-)

All in all, it's probably more effective to just find a flash cart for the SNES/SFC that uses CF or SD cards, and sell your DX2 on eBay or something (if you want to part with it, else keep it for nostalgia).

For one thing, can those old copiers be used to dump? For another, you can't sell a console game copier on eBay because eBay's policies assume that these devices lack substantial noninfringing use, paralleling Red Hat's decision not to carry emulators.

The SWC DX2 supports hard disks, ZIP drives, and CDROMs through some particular manner (IDE, so I'm guessing IDE to LPT?) which I can't remember. I have a working SWC DX2 as well, BTW, but I don't use Macs.

Yeah the CDROM interface was a bit of an oddball. I remember reading about people discovering compatible drives/interfaces somewhere but those are rare apparently. I don't even care much about the ability to hook up a cd anyway though.

To be honest the most complicated part was getting support for 24 and 32mbit working. I wasn't able to accomplish this until one day a colleague of mine (Royce from Damaged Cybernetics) told me to bitwise > AND the raw data bytes with some special value -- and it worked. I still to this day have no clue how/why. And the uCON64 source is kind of an uncommented dump of a mess...

I've had my own fair share of fiddling with the swc and the protocol. The fact that there are a couple of faulty versions of the protocol specs was not helping.

All in all, it's probably more effective to just find a flash cart for the SNES/SFC that uses CF or SD cards, and sell your DX2 on eBay or something (if you want to part with it, else keep it for nostalgia).

No way, i'll never part with that one. As a matter of fact I do have a SD2SNES and a quickdev16 but neither are as convenient as the swc used to be. It has decent transfer speeds and I could upload/patch ROM at runtime, reset to the SWC menu through the parallel port etc.

Still I don't really fancy the idea of an extra PC just for the parallel port transfers. My house is to crowded as it is. That is unless I find something super small ;-]

gilligan wrote:Still I don't really fancy the idea of an extra PC just for the parallel port transfers. My house is to crowded as it is. That is unless I find something super small ;-]

GA-E350N(but not -USB3) ?

That said, koitsu's documentation link does give you enough information to move a microcontroller-using project from "painful" to "work, but feasible".

Old business laptops are pretty easy to find cheaply or even free, if you know anyone in corporate IT they probably have a closet full of them. I keep a Thinkpad T42 around just for DOS games and using a parallel port programmer. Doesn't take up too much space when I'm not using it and it runs the Windows 98 only software fine. I think the T43 is the last model with a hardware parallel port though.